In an interview with Health Affairs NIH head and former Johns Hopkins professor Elias Zerhouni argues that medicine needs to advance from a curative care model to a model that stresses the preclinical phase. The current care model, which relies on "seventeen, eighteen, nineteen people per patient per encounter," is simply unsustainable. Medicine, he argues, must advance to become "pre-emptive", treating diseases far earlier than they are today. Rather revealingly, Zerhouni downplays the current topic de jour--electronic medical records--saying, "Electronic medical records are important but they are at the margins." What is needed, he argues, is a true revolution.
- see this article from Health Affairs